CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpdatetimetimezone
CRAIG
CRAIG

Reputation: 1029

Converting Timezone String to UTC offset using PHP

I have a Wordpress marketplace store where the "author" of a product has their timezone stored in usermeta in the string format, i.e. Americas/Chicago.

I am wanting to output each user's timezone with a UTC offset instead of string so I can more easily manipulate it. I got this example below from another stack overflow question but it isn't working in my situation.

$timezone = 'America/New_York'; //example string although I am getting the timezone from the database based on each users settings

if(!empty($timezone)) {
    $UTC = new DateTimeZone("UTC");
    $newTZ = new DateTimeZone($timezone);
    $date = new DateTime( $newTZ );
    $date->setTimezone( $UTC);
    echo $date->format('H:i:s');
}

However, this code breaks the page. Can't understand why it would be breaking the page. I put it into a separate function and it still breaks and the error log isn't much help either.

The log says: 

DateTime->__construct(Object(DateTimeZone))

Upvotes: 0

Views: 717

Answers (1)

John Conde
John Conde

Reputation: 219804

The error message is pretty clear:

Fatal error: Uncaught TypeError: DateTime::__construct() expects parameter 1 to be string, object given

The timezone is second parameter for DateTime. So if you want to work with "now' either pass "now" or null as the first parameter.

$timezone = 'America/New_York'; //example string although I am getting the timezone from the database based on each users settings

if(!empty($timezone)) {
    $UTC = new DateTimeZone("UTC");
    $newTZ = new DateTimeZone($timezone);
    $date = new DateTime(null, $newTZ );
    $date->setTimezone( $UTC);
    echo $date->format('H:i:s');
}

Upvotes: 2

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